Thursday, 9 February 2017

Media Quotes of the Week: From Trump era boosts quality journalism to Hockney takes a shine to Sun

New York Times chief executive Mark Thompson on a tenfold increase in digital subscriptions to the paper frequently attacked by Donald Trump, quoted by BBC News: "It's not a political point, it's purely a commercial point: the Trump era seems to be a very good era for quality journalism."

Donald Trump on the media and terrorist attacks, as reported by CBS News: “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. In many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand that.”

Der Spiegel editor-in-chief Klaus Brinkbaeumer defending the magazine's Trump cover, quoted by the Guardian: “We want to show what this is about, it’s about democracy, it’s about freedom, it’s about freedom of the press, freedom of justice and all that is seriously endangered. So we are defending democracy … Are these serious times? Yes they are.”

Nick Cohen in the Observer: "Every one of the many financial and political scandals Trump will surely generate will emerge in the media. Every media organisation must therefore be branded as lying and fake before they publish. Journalists need to learn, if they have not learned already, that no accommodation is possible with the alt-right because its ideology and tactics preclude it from wanting an accommodation. You cannot 'balance' or appease such people – you can only expose them."

Mick Hume on Spiked: "Far from being an extraordinary throwback to fascism, Trump’s contempt for free speech might make him seem a representative president for his time. As my book Trigger Warning argues, we live in the age of the ‘reverse-Voltaires’. The classic statement of support for free speech credited to the French revolutionary Voltaire – ‘I may despise what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it’ – has now been twisted into its opposite: ‘I know I will hate what you say, and I will fight to the end of free speech for my right to stop you saying it.’ The reverse-Voltaire in the White House and the ones protesting outside just disagree about which ideas they find too offensive to tolerate."

Martin Kettle in the Guardian: "Today more than ever the Mail has a self-interest in the denigration of parliament, and an equally profound self-interest in the promotion of referendums it can shape and destabilise by its journalism. Though it speaks incessantly about the will of the people and the freedom of the press, it is in the end only interested in the will and freedom of the Daily Mail. Neither of these have anything to do with democracy or with good government – as the debacle of post-referendum politics is making clear each day. Cameron might have been a fool to try to oust Dacre, but one can easily understand precisely why he tried."

Matt Kelly, editor of TheNew European and chief content officer at Archant, interviewed in InPublishing: “The print format [of TheNew European] was very important for the start. There’s no way we’d have done it if we were ‘digital-first’ – it’d have been a website, and that would’ve been a mistake. No-one would’ve wanted to write for it or read it. It’s why ‘audience-first’ is a better approach. Could it now migrate to digital? Perhaps, and we’re looking at that. But it could never have established that audience in digital.”

The Sunday Times reports [£]: The Sunday Times has been gagged by an injunction preventing it from reporting details about a celebrity’s personal and professional life. The judge anonymised the individual using initials. The newspaper is in legal proceedings."

David Hockney on being asked to design a special Sun logo: “I was delighted to be asked. Once I thought about the idea it didn’t take me long. The sun and The Sun. I love it.”Jonathan Jones in the Guardianreviews Hockney's work: "What he has done here is to beautifully turn the Sun into a hymn to the sun, by adding a childlike drawing of the orb spreading its white rays through the red masthead."

About Me

I am a freelance journalist based in the UK and was deputy editor of Press Gazette, the journalists' magazine, from 1993 until 2006. I want to give an independent view on media matters.
You can contact me with stories, ideas and comments by email at jon.slattery369@btinternet.com You can also follow me on Twitter @jonslattery